Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

War and America

The combined cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan recently surpassed the benchmark of jaw-dropitude that is $1 trillion, so people have been taking more notice than usual. On this topic, I liked Elisabeth Bumiller’s feature in the NYT today. Money quote:

A second look at the numbers shows another story underneath. In 2008, the peak year so far of war spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, the costs amounted to only 1.2 percent of America’s gross domestic product. During the peak year of spending on World War II, 1945, the costs came to nearly 36 percent of G.D.P.

The reason is the immense growth, and seemingly limitless credit, of the United States economy over the last 65 years, as compared to the sacrifice and unity required to wring $4 trillion from a much smaller economy to wage the earlier war. To some historians, the difference is troubling.

“The army is at war, but the country is not,” said David M. Kennedy, the Stanford University historian. “We have managed to create and field an armed force that can engage in very, very lethal warfare without the society in whose name it fights breaking a sweat.” The result, he said, is “a moral hazard for the political leadership to resort to force in the knowledge that civil society will not be deeply disturbed.”

That’s the thing. We do have round-the-clock cable and internet news coverage of these wars in a way that we have never had before. But probably not since the horrors of Fallujah have most Americans really had any sense of the human loss that is going on in our name. I saw a figure in Der Spiegel today that blew me away–at the height of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1968, there were roughly 1,000 soldiers dying each week. By comparison, the entire coalition has taken fewer than 2,000 deaths in nearly a decade in Afghanistan. So long as limbless men aren’t wheeling around our streets asking for money and an “acceptable” number of flag-draped caskets are showing up at the local airport, most people seem perfectly content to grumble about the war a bit in between breaks of pro sporting events and American Idol.

People are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our soldiers, yes, but far more innocent local people, people who have committed no mistake greater than being born into a warzone. Every family shot at a roadblock, every bomb dropped on a wedding party, every drone that takes out an entire family to get one bad guy–all of that blood is on our hands.

I wish that this dreadful feeling of culpability would be enough to make Americans demand a stop to these wars. But it seems that all that really matters to people at home is how many of our caskets are coming home, not what markets in Baghdad look like after a suicide bomb.

So maybe the financial issue will have to be what it takes to make the scales fall from our eyes. We aren’t “breaking a sweat” for now because our taxes are low, but today’s low taxes lead to today and tomorrow’s crippling debts. Debts and deficits are suddenly the hot issues of the day, so maybe people will take notice of the wars again. I just don’t see it happening, though. If people haven’t understood time preference in this country since the introduction of easily available credit, I don’t see any reason why they would suddenly understand it now.

Perhaps most telling of all was another quote from the story:

A last story in the numbers: A quick calculation shows that the United States has been at war for 47 of its 230 years, or 20 percent of its history. Put another way, Americans have been at war one year out of every five.

War is what we are accustomed to. We are a modern-day Prussia with Wilsonian ideals. Let me out.